WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.

LEADERSHIP TIPS“The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)

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With Headscarf Case, Supreme Court Could Make Discrimination Even Easier

By Guest Author R. Scott Oswald

Imagine you're a store owner who's interviewing three finalists for a sales job. All are equally qualified-but two need a little flexibility.

Daniel is Jewish; he doesn't work on Friday nights or Saturdays.

Lisa is a Christian who doesn't work on Sundays.

The third candidate, Kim, can work any day.

At your store everyone gets weekend duty twice a month. A while ago you bent the rules for a Sabbath observer: It was no hardship, but it caused muttering. You'd prefer not to do it again.

During interviews neither Daniel nor Lisa mentions religion; you never ask. But Daniel talks about growing up in Israel, just as your last Sabbath observer did. A potential problem, you conclude, and cross him off your list. You offer the job to Lisa, unaware she has a similar conflict.

Have you discriminated illegally against Daniel? Probably so: The law requires you to discuss reasonable accommodations for religious practices.

But let's be frank: Unless you reveal your private thoughts, you'll likely get away with it.

Hiring bias thrives on such silent brush-offs. Job seekers in wheelchairs know the shabby routine. So do job seekers of color, job seekers with foreign accents, older job seekers, and others. Every day these applicants must swallow unjust rejection, knowing they can't call anyone to account.

Every once in a while, however, an employer tips its hand. Back in 2011, for instance, a federal court found that Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing retailer, discriminated when it rejected a Muslim job seeker who interviewed in a headscarf, or hijab.

On February 25 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether to let Abercrombie off the hook. The case focuses on religious bias, but it may also affect disabled workers and some pregnant women. In effect, the Court could deny protection to applicants who don't warn employers explicitly that they'll need flexibility-even if the employers end up rejecting them on exactly that basis.

Some background: At über-preppy Abercrombie, black clothing is verboten for salespeople, as is some headwear. Nonetheless, in 2008 Heather Cooke, an Abercrombie hiring manager in Tulsa, Okla., decided she wanted to hire then-17-year-old Samantha Elauf, who had worn a black headscarf to her interview.

Cooke correctly assumed that Elauf wore the scarf for religious reasons, but she never raised the issue and figured that Abercrombie could adapt its rules. When Cooke checked with a higher-up, however, she was ordered to ding Elauf for the hijab. The lower rating made Elauf unhirable, and Cooke never called the teenager back.

For most job seekers, the story would end there-another silent rejection. But a friend at Abercrombie tipped Elauf, who contacted the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC sued Abercrombie on her behalf, claiming that the retailer knew it should try to accommodate the hijab-yet failed to discuss it. The judge agreed, and a jury awarded Elauf $20,000.

Abercrombie appealed, saying it couldn't be liable for failing to do something that Elauf never requested-and anyhow, that it didn't know for sure about the scarf. A federal appeals court bought that logic, setting up next week's showdown.

How would our imaginary job seekers fare if Abercrombie wins again?

First Daniel, who studied in Israel and never knew of your Sabbath issue. Out of luck, says Abercrombie: He didn't specify his need, so you don't have to accommodate it.

But suppose, in a fit of honesty, you tell Daniel why you rejected him. Now can he hold you accountable? Still no, says Abercrombie: Liability kicks in only after an explicit request.

How about Lisa, who doesn't work Sundays? Let's say she spoke up during your interview, trying to protect her rights. Would you still have hired her?

Or would you maybe have "realized" that flexible Kim is a better candidate-for totally non-discriminatory reasons, of course-and issued another silent rejection?

Thought so.

Employees live in the real world; so must our laws. Hiring bias is common, and already tough to prove. The Supreme Court shouldn't make things worse by making job seekers' legal rights depend on their mind-reading ability-or on their willingness to risk a job offer.

If an employer shows bias, it should answer to a jury.

R. Scott Oswald is managing principal of The Employment Law Group, P.C.

He is a past president of the Metropolitan Washington Employment Lawyers Association.

The world's population will likely grow to 10 billion people by the end to the century, and their energy requirements will grow much, much faster. Today two-thirds of all people are still poor and consume little energy. As they approach a Western standard of living, they're going to want more than they have now of the things you and I take for granted.

Improvements in the efficiency of renewable or sustainable energy, mainly solar and wind, will likely become economical. But in the foreseeable future, there is no remotely practical substitute for the high-density energy of fossil fuels.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states, in essence, that without continual energy, all systems wind down. The Second Law is always there, grinding away. And over the coming generation, the companies and countries that control fossil fuels are going to have more influence on the rest of the world than they ever had before.

Energy is what makes the world go round.

For most of the past 60 years, the United States has prospered, largely because it has dominated the energy market but also because it issues the currency in which energy and other resources are traded. However, U.S. strength has been ebbing in the "Colder War" as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin positions himself for the final push. While the United States dithers over green energy, Russia has a Putin in its tank.

Today, Russia and China are encouraging the abandonment of the dollar by developing international trade facilities that operate without touching U.S. currency.

Other countries are following the lead given by Russia and China. Also the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) took a huge step toward autonomy at an economic summit in Fortaleza, Brazil in July 2014. What currencies will be involved are not yet known, but these five countries are clearly moving to disengage from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)--both of which are subject to the dollar's current dominion.

Those unhappy with U.S. over involvement in world affairs are inspired to discover ways to escape dependence on the dollar. The United States intended to demonstrate to the world that it still carried the biggest stick. Instead, it has shown that getting whacked with the stick needn't hurt that much. U.S. sanctions against Russia for its involvement in Ukraine are having the same perverse effect on the dollar as sanctions against Iran.

Putin and his allies are embarked on a mission to sabotage the petrodollar. You now know this, and you know its importance.

Three factors argue persuasively that the undoing of the dollar will be comparatively abrupt and disturbing.

First, in its heyday, Britain ruled a vastly different world. Today, there are multiple centers of financial power--including Russia, China and Brazil--with the technical ability to build dollar-less systems.

Second, ubiquitous computing capacity will make it easier to leave the dollar.

Third, the volume of the assets that will be shunned will be unprecedented. The United States slipped away from the gold discipline in 1971. Since then, exporting dollars and dollar-denominated IOUs has been a major industry. The volume of dollar assets that foreigners will be shifting away from will be much bigger and will move like a landslide.

For the United States, self-restraint hasn't been part of the program, and now, reasonably or not, the world is full of resentment. As the need for U.S. currency declines, the resentful will find dumping the dollar entirely agreeable, a satisfying exercise in passive aggression.

Expect more conflict between Russia and the West. And expect the conflict to make access to energy and other resources even more valuable than it is today. Understanding that fact is the key to profiting from Putin's vision.

Paul Spiegelman says, "Let's face it: Employees in most companies get treated as second-class citizens. If that's the case, how can we expect them to treat customers well? The same is true for employees in the healthcare field.

In healthcare, we need a model for the delivery of a great experience for each patient. It is not a question of ranking what in more important, but a question of leading and lagging indicators of success. In that regard, I firmly believe that the most successful organizations with the most loyal customers (or patients) have focused first on an internal culture of engagement where leadership shows a genuine interest in the growth and development of its people. If you do that, accountability will only increase, not create excuses for lack of execution.

Our industry needs to be shaken up a bit. My hope is that our book will stir healthy conversation and action to improve internal cultures in healthcare. It is sorely needed."

The business case is compelling. Companies with more women in leadership posts simply perform better. Fortune 500 firms with the most female board members outperform those with the least by 26% on return on invested capital and 16% on return on sales, according to a 2011 Catalyst study.

Yet the number of women at the top is barely budging: some 5% of Fortune 500 chief executive officers and 17% of board members.

“If you want to change the numbers, you have to get men involved,” says Mike Kaufmann, chief financial officer of Cardinal Health. He’s doing just that: He leads the company women’s networking group.

Executives elsewhere are following suit. Bain & Co.’s global women’s leadership council, created in 2009, is now about 40% male. And for the first time, the National Association for Female Executives is including men in its fall round table meeting.

In the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business landscape expected to continue for 2015,leaders face many challenges, requiring aggressive, sustained talent management strategies to prepare them for success.

The report consists of responses from an unparalleled participant pool of 13,124 global leaders and 1,528 human resource executives within 2,031 participating organizations. Forty-eight countries and 32 major industries are represented, as well as multinationals and local corporations. Eighteen significant findings are detailed in the report.

According to the research, 25 percent of organizations report their leaders are not capable across any of the VUCA challenges. “This report is a breakthrough because it examines specific talent practices that drive financial performance to help organizations prepare their leaders to manage in this new business environment,” stated Rebecca Ray, Ph.D., The Conference Board, Executive Vice President, Knowledge Organization and Human Capital Practice Lead and study co-author.

Participating organizations that are publicly traded on global financial markets were divided into groups that included those in the top 20 percent of financial performers and those in the bottom 20 percent, based on a composite index of financial performance and external metrics on profitability, earnings per share, five-year rate of return to investors and stockholder equity. The following seven leadership best practices identify what organizations in the top 20 percent of financially performing companies are doing differently from the bottom performers and how much more likely they are to be successful compared to organizations that are not using the identified best practice.

2. More than three-and-a-half times more likely to have effective high-potential programs in place. Having a quality, highly supported program can mean the difference between retaining or losing a high-potential leader—participants are 50 percent less likely to leave than those in weakly supported programs. Targeting the right-size pool is equally critical. Organizations with a larger pool of high potentials (35+ percent) risk lower levels of engagement and retention (33 percent) than those with a smaller pool (15-30 percent) since resources are spread too thin. Organizations with too few high-potential leaders (5-10 percent) have an even greater risk.

3. Two times more likely to place value on interacting over managing skills. The research also indicates organizations that value interacting are two times more likely to have highly engaged leaders, 3.5 times more likely to have strong current leaders and have 20 percent more of their leaders ready to fill critical roles. Leaders in companies prioritizing interaction skills are more effective at coaching and developing others; communicating and interacting; developing strong networks and partnerships; fostering employee creativity and innovation; and identifying and developing future talent. Conversely, organizations that focus heavily on managerial responsibilities report less job satisfaction, higher turnover and lower engagement among leaders.

4. Three times more likely to incorporate an integrated learning journey versus a course-list approach when developing their leaders. The research revealed learning experiences are often considered in isolation only instead of as learning journeys that incorporate planned sequences, integrating on-the-job and formal learning opportunities. By viewing on-the-job learning more like formal learning and vice versa, organizations can benefit from the strengths of both forms and generate strong development outcomes for leaders and greater business value.

5. Six times more likely to use analytics to predict future leadership talent needs. The research focused on several forms of leadership analytics that ranged from basic to advanced to better understand the gap between HR analytics practices and recognized value to the business. The study found that 47 percent of organizations do not do any kind of leadership analytics well. Worse yet, only one in 20 did all forms well. An even larger issue: What organizations are doing rarely produces value for the business. Thirty percent oforganizations are using low-value analytics such as gathering efficiency and reactions metrics about leadership programs while only 21 percent are effectively using analytics that reap greater financial gains such as gathering business impact metrics about leadership programs and targeting the gap between current leader readiness and long-term business objectives.

6. Four times more likely to have built a strong pipeline of ready-now leaders to fill available critical roles. Across the entire sample, on average, only 46 percent of available positions could be filled immediately by internal candidates. Organizations that don’t link leader performance expectations to organizational strategy have the greatest decrease in the percentage of ready-now leaders (11 percent). The greatest increases occur when organizations incorporate high-quality, effective development plans (nine percent).

“In highly competitive fields and in the midst of ongoing economic uncertainties, organizations need to leverage innovative and creative ways to develop their leaders’ required skills,” said Rich Wellins, Ph.D., DDI Senior Vice President and study co-author. “Armed with the information in this report, organizations can make better decisions about their leadership practices and development that directly link to positive business outcomes in the current and projected VUCA business environment.”

In college football, where fans of opposing teams can’t agree on much of anything, they do share one opinion: There is no such thing as a boring rivalry.

Rivalry games make or break seasons even when the matchups appear lopsided. This season’s rivalry weekend, for instance, has a number of them: Florida State, Ohio State and Oregon are all in the College Football Playoff race, while rivals Florida, Michigan and Oregon State are all having excruciating seasons. But if any of them pull off an upset Saturday, it would make their year—and ruin their rival’s.

The oomph in every rivalry comes from similarity, proximity and history.

Auburn versus Alabama—an intrastate matchup of public universities that dates to 1893—could be a case study. Research also shows that sports rivalries are stronger when their historical records against each other are closer.

As it happens, heading into Saturday’s games, Auburn-Alabama and Ole Miss-Mississippi State both are 18-16 since 1980 in favor of the former, while Ohio State leads Michigan, 17-16, with one tie.

There is enough scholarly literature about choking under pressure to fill Michigan Stadium, while academics caution that they are just beginning to learn how rivalries shape our lives.

The elements of a successful exit breaks down into four stages: exploration, strategy, execution and transition--all potentially tricky.

Entrepreneurs who leave their positions with a sense of accomplishment, feeling well compensated and secure in the belief that their employees would be treated well by their successors, feel better about the move.

Some advice for anyone who owns a business or is planning to launch one:

If you haven't already begun thinking about your eventual exit, now is the time to start. You should do so even if you currently believe that you'll never want to sell the business. For your sake and your company's sake, you should begin to think now about the circumstances under which you might leave and do all you can to ensure that the company could be sold at some point for as much money as possible.

As noted, there are four stages in the exit process, and doing the deal comes not first or second, but third. It's preceded by the strategic phase, when you build into the company the qualities and characteristics that will allow you to have the kind of exit you want.

The timing has nothing to dowith whether you want to do it. It's just the right time to sell. You sell when the selling is good, not when you think you'd like to. Doing anything else, you run the risk of leaving a whole bunch of money on the table.

The more prepared you are when that day comes, the more likely it is that the parting will be a happy one.

Dara Richardson-Heron, M.D., Chief executive of the Y.W.C.A. USA:

"There are so few women in leadership, and the burden on women who are leaders is so high, because you’re expected to be everything to everybody, and to pave the way and bring more women in, and root out all the bad stuff."

Sharon Napier, Chief executive, Partners + Napier, an ad agency:

"I love to see someone at a lower or a midlevel position walk into a meeting and know what their role is and have a point of view. Don’t sit quietly and think about things and maybe whisper to somebody or tell people afterward. Put yourself out there, and get involved in the conversation."

"If you just ask me about things that affected my career, being a woman would not be on the list. I really don’t think of it that way. I also don’t think the discussion is healthy about, “Here’s how women lead. Here’s how men lead.”

I believe that for two reasons. One is that I think there are lots of different kinds of women leaders and lots of different kinds of men leaders. There isn’t one type of leader who is different because of sex."

Jenny Ming, Chief executive of Charlotte Russe, a clothing chain:

"A store director once said to me: “Jenny, you’re just too nice. You let people walk all over you.” When people say those words, they put you in a little box, and the message is that you’re not leadership material. So I realized early on that you need to let people know what your expectations are, but not tell them specifically what to do."

Deflation Rearing its Ugly Head in Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Ways Around the Globe

By Steve Hochberg and Pete Kendall, Elliott Wave International

The following article was adapted with permission from the November 2014 issue of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, a publication from Elliott Wave International, the world's largest market forecasting firm.Follow this link for the complete article.

According to the latest figures, deflation is now perched on China's doorstep.

In September, China's consumer price index was up 1.6%, but its producer price index fell 1.8%. The CPI increase was its lowest since 2010.

Economic growth is also receding. It's hard to pinpoint the exact figures, because Chinese economic data is notoriously sketchy. But in September, demand for electric power, a "bellwether for China economic activity," fell 8.4% from the prior month, the second straight monthly decline.

"Deflation is the real risk in China," stated the chief economist at a Hong Kong bank.

In Europe, deflation is no longer a possible risk; it's reality.

In September, eleven of fifteen European Union members experienced lower goods prices, and the latest quarter-over-quarter Eurozone growth in real GDP is zero. The next chart shows the Eurostat Eurozone year-over-year change in goods prices, which is -0.3% in September.

P.S. This event is open to current Elliott Wave International subscribers and Club EWI members only. If you do not yet have a free Club EWI account, you can follow this link to set up one now.

About the Publisher, Elliott Wave International: Founded in 1979 by Robert R. Prechter Jr., Elliott Wave International (EWI) is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.

Changes in the world of work are imposing new challenges on leaders, the most significant of which are:

Innovation: the challenge is to create an innovative and entreprenurial culture that meets ever-increasing customer needs.

Talent management: this involves not only attracting exceptional individuals, but also developing and retaining them.

Communication: the 21st Century knowledge economy poses both threats and opportunities for leaders. Companies must harness the communication opportunities of the Internet and social media in particular, in order to innovate, differentiate and encourage positive customer interaction.

Globalization: in an expanding business world, organizations and their leaders have to appreciate the challenges it poses. Cultural norms can impact on leader--follower relations due to the behavior and expectations of both parties.